JSON Serialization Sectrets

The other day I come up with an idea to serialize JSON in a pretty fast way. I will share it in the hope that someone will find it useful.

(From a Node.js perspective) Traditionally the serialization of objects is made possible by the native JSON.stringify method. What it does is very simple: - evaluates every property - evaluates every value corresponding to that property - parse strings looking for unwanted characters - concatenates a long string based on properties/values found

This serialization technique performs a lot of subsequent concatenations.

So I scratched my head to find a workaround for performing a smaller number of operations yielding the same result.

If you know in advance the schema of the JSON that is going to be serialized you can do a little trick.

In order: - You build a schema defining the JSON structure - Transform the schema into a string - Transform the string into a template

So, when serializing: - You are basically filling the blanks of your pre-made template - Done.

It turns out that this serialization method is exceptionally fast. In some use cases, you can see a performance improvement of 10000x on native JSON.stringify (benchmarks below).

Clearly, this method has limitations. E.g. you can serialize only objects with a fixed structure. But, if you are dealing with objects that don't change much, it can save you a ton of time.

I wrapped it in a github repo (with benchmarks): https://github.com/lucagez/slow-json-stringify

Happy serialization everyone!